An enterprise network may be a complex infrastructure, such as a large-scale heterogeneous network. This huge and complex enterprise network presents many challenges for engineers in managing and maintaining the performance of the network. For example, large enterprise networks may contain more than 100,000 clients and servers and more than 5,000 routers and switches. In addition, the services that operate on these networks are very complicated. Existing enterprise networks and service monitoring tools are not up to the task of discovering why requests to download a service or an application are being delayed.
The network enterprise includes connecting information technology resources of an organization, which includes users, servers, and the like. In particular, users in the enterprise network may often encounter problems, such as performance problems, service disruptions, and the like. User-perceptible and annoying hangs are rampant, which cause frustrations for the users. Even within an enterprise network, there is little indication of where the problem lies, and how to mitigate the problem. As a result, users in the enterprise network are often inconvenienced due to the performance problems, service disruptions, which can be very time consuming and unproductive.
Accurate and fast fault detection is critical for network management. Existing management systems have tried to detect failures with packet traces, but the traces did not detect failures that affected the end user. Also, it is difficult to identify when problems occur. Thus, packet traces have not been widely utilized for detecting faults perceived by users in an enterprise network.